Issues regarding eating
meat were highlighted in 1997 by the
longest trial in British legal history. McDonald's Corporation
and McDonald's
Restaurants Limited v. Steel and Morris, better
known as the
"McLibel" trial, ran for 515 days and heard 180 witnesses. In
suing Helen Steel
and David Morris, two activists involved with the London
Greenpeace organization, McDonald's put on trial the way in which
its fast-food
products are produced, packaged, advertised, and sold, as well
as their
nutritional value, the environmental impact of producing them,
and the treatment
of the animals whose flesh and eggs are made into that
food. […]

The case provided a
remarkable opportunity for weighing up evidence
for and against
modern agribusiness methods. The leaflet "What's Wrong
with McDonald's"
that provoked the defamation suit had a row of
McDonald's arches
along the top of each page. Two of these arches bore
the words
"McMurder" and "McTorture." One section below was headed
"In what way are
McDonald's responsible for torture and murder?" The
leaflet answered
the question as follows:

The menu at McDonald's is
based on meat. They sell millions of burgers every day in 55
countries throughout the world. This means the constant slaughter,
day by day, of animals born and bred solely to be turned
into McDonalds
products. Some of them-especially chickens and
pigs-spend their lives in the entirely artificial conditions of
huge factory farms, with no access to air or sunshine and no
freedom of movement. Their deaths are bloody and barbaric.

McDonald's claimed that
the leaflet meant that the company was responsible for the
inhumane torture and murder of cattle, chicken, and
pigs, and that this
was defamatory. In considering this claim, Mr. Justice
Bell based his
judgment on what he took to be attitudes that were generally
accepted in Britain. Thus for the epithet "McTorture" to be
justified he
held, it would not be enough for Steel and Morris to show that
animals
were under stress
or suffered some pain or discomfort:

Merely containing,
handling and transporting an animal may cause it
stress; and taking
it to slaughter certainly may do so. But I do not believe that the
ordinary reasonable person believes any of these things to be
cruel, provided that the necessary stress, or discomfort or even
pain
is kept to a
reasonably acceptable level. That ordinary person may know
little about the
detail of farming and slaughtering methods but he must
had a certain
amount of stress, discomfort or even pain acceptable and
not to be
criticised as cruel.

By the end of the trial,
however, Mr. Justice Bell found that the stress
discomfort, and
pain inflicted on some animals amounted to more than
this acceptable
level, and hence did constitute a "cruel practice" for
which McDonald's
was "culpably responsible." Chickens, laying hens
and sows, he said,
kept in individual stalls suffered from "severe restriction
of movement" which
"is cruel." He also found a number of other cruel
practices in the
production of chickens, including the restricted diet fed
to breeding birds,
which leaves them permanently hungry; the injuries inflicted on
chickens by catchers stuffing 600 birds an hour into crates to
take them to
slaughter; and the failure of the stunning apparatus to ensure
that all birds are
stunned before they have their throats cut. Judging by entirely
conventional moral standards, Mr. Justice Bell held these
practices
to be cruel, and
McDonald's to be culpably responsible for them.

It was not libelous to
describe McDonald's as "McTorture," because
the charge was
substantially true. What follows from this judgment about
the morality of
buying and eating intensively raised chickens, pig products that
come from the offspring of sows kept in stalls, or eggs laid by
hens kept in
battery cages? Surely that, too, must be wrong?

This claim has
been challenged. At a conference dinner some years ago I found
myself sitting opposite a Buddhist philosopher from Thailand. As
we helped ourselves to the lavish buffet, I avoided the various
forms of meat being offered, but the Thai philosopher did not.
When I asked him how he reconciled the dinner he had chosen with
the first precept of Buddhism, which tells us to avoid harming
sentient beings, he told me that in the Buddhist tradition it is
wrong to eat meat only if you have reason to believe that the
animal was killed specially for you. The meat he had taken,
however, was not from animals killed specially for him; the
animals would have died anyway, even if he were a strict
vegetarian or had not been in that city at all. Hence, by eating
it, he was not harming any animals.

I was unable to
convince my dinner companion that this defense of meat eating was
better suited to a time when a peasant family might kill an animal
especially to have something to put in the begging bowl of a
wandering monk than it is to our own era. The flaw in the defense
is the disregard of the link between the meat I eat today and the
future killing of animals. Granted, the chicken lying in the
supermarket freezer today would have died even if I had never
existed; but the fact that I take the chicken from the freezer,
and ignore the tofu on a nearby shelf, has something to do with
the number of chickens, or blocks of tofu, the supermarket will
order next week and thus contributes, in a small way, to the
future growth or decline of the chicken and tofu industries. That
is what the laws of supply and demand are all about.

Some defenders
of a variant of the ancient Buddhist line may still want to argue
that one chicken fewer sold makes no perceptible difference to the
chicken producers, and therefore there can be nothing wrong with
buying chicken. The division of moral responsibility in a
situation of this kind does raise some interesting issues, but it
is a fallacy to argue that a person can do wrong only by making a
perceptible harm. The
Oxford philosopher Jonathan Glover has explored the
implications of this refusal to accept the divisibility of
responsibility in an entertaining article called "It makes no
difference whether or not I do it" [Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 1975).

Glover imagines
that in a village, 100 people are about to eat lunch. Each has a
bowl containing 100 beans. Suddenly, 100 hungry bandits swoop down
on the village. Each bandit takes the contents of the bowl of one
villager, eats it, and gallops off. Next week, the bandits plan to
do it again, but one of their number is afflicted by doubts about
whether it is right
to steal from the poor. These doubts are set to rest by another of
their
number who proposes
that each bandit, instead of eating the entire contents of the
bowl of one villager, should take one bean from every villager's
bowl. Since the loss of one bean cannot make a perceptible
difference to any
villager, no bandit will have harmed anyone. The bandits follow
this plan, each taking a solitary bean from 100 bowls. The
villagers are just as hungry as they were the previous week, but
the bandits
can all sleep well
on their full stomachs, knowing that none of them has
harmed anyone.

Glover's example shows the
absurdity of denying that we are each responsible for a share of
the harms we collectively cause, even if each of us
makes no
perceptible difference. McDonald's has a far bigger impact on
the practices of
the chicken, egg, and pig industries than any individual
consumer; but
McDonald's itself would be powerless if no one ate at its
restaurants.
Collectively, all consumers of animal products are responsible for
the existence of the cruel practices involved in producing them.
In
the absence of
special circumstances, a portion of this responsibility must
be attributed to
each purchaser.

Without in any way
departing from a conventional moral attitude
toward animals,
then, we have reached the conclusion that eating intensively
produced chicken, battery eggs, and some pig products is wrong.
This is, of course,
well short of an argument for vegetarianism. Mr. Justice
Bell found "cruel
practices" only in these areas of McDonald's food production. But
he did not find that McDonald's beef is "cruelty-free." He did
not consider that question, because he drew a distinction between
McDonald's
responsibility for practices in the beef and dairy industries
and those in the
chicken, egg, and pig industries. McDonald's chickens
eggs, and pig
products are supplied by a relatively small number of very
large producers,
over whose practices the corporation could quite easily
have a major
influence. On the other hand, McDonald's beef and dairy
requirements came
from a very large number of producers; and in respect
of whose methods,
Mr. Justice Bell held, "there was no evidence from
which I could infer
that [McDonald's] would have any effective influence, should it
try to exert it." Whatever one may think of that view-it
seems highly
implausible to me-the judge, in accepting it, decided not
to address the
evidence presented to him of cruelty in the raising of cattle, so
that no conclusions either way can be drawn.

This does not mean that
the trial itself had nothing to say about animal suffering in
general. McDonald's called as a witness Mr. David
Walker, chief
executive of one of McDonald's major United Kingdom
suppliers, McKey
Food Services Ltd. In cross-examination, Helen Steel
asked Walker
whether it was true that, "as the result of the meat industry,
the suffering of
animals is inevitable." Walker replied: "The answer to that
must be 'yes.' "

Walker's admission raises
a serious question about the ethics of the
meat industry: how
much suffering are we justified in inflicting on animals in order
to turn them into meat, or to use their eggs or milk?

The case for
vegetarianism is at
its strongest when we see it as
a moral protest
against our use of animals as mere things, to be exploited
for our convenience
in whatever way makes them most cheaply available
to us. Only the
tiniest fraction of the tens of billions of farm animals
slaughtered for
food each year—the figure for the United States alone is
nine billion—were
treated during their lives in ways that respected their
interests.
Questions about the wrongness of killing in itself are not
relevant to the moral issue of eating meat or eggs from
factory-farmed animals, as most people in developed countries do.
Even when animals are
roaming freely over large areas, as sheep and cattle do in
Australia, operations like hot-iron branding, castration, and
dehorning are carried out
without any regard
for the animals' capacity to suffer. The same is true of
handling and
transport prior to slaughter. In the light of these facts, the
issue to focus on
is not whether there are some circumstances in which it
could be right to
eat meat, but on what we can do to avoid contributing
to this immense
amount of animal suffering.

The answer is to boycott
all meat and eggs produced by large-scale
commercial methods
of animal production, and encourage others to do
the same.
Consideration for the interests of animals alone is enough
justification for this response, but the case is further
strengthened by the environmental problems that the meat industry
causes. Although Mr.
Justice Bell found
that the allegations directed at McDonald's regarding
its contribution to
the destruction of rain forests were not true, the meat
industry as a whole
can take little comfort from that, because Bell accepted evidence
that cattle-ranching, particularly in Brazil, had contributed to
the clearing of vast areas of rain forest. The problem for David
Morris and Helen
Steel was that they did not convince the judge that the
meat used by
McDonald's came from these regions. So the meat industry
as a whole remains
culpable for the loss of rain forest and for all the con
sequences of that, from global warming to the deaths of indigenous
people fighting to defend their way of life.

Environmentalists are increasingly recognizing that the choice of
what we eat is an environmental issue. Animals raised in sheds or
on feedlots eat grains or soybeans, and they use most of the food
value of these products simply in order to maintain basic
functions and develop unpalatable parts of the body like bones and
skin. To convert eight or nine kilos of grain protein into a
single kilo of animal protein wastes land, energy, and water. On a
crowded planet with a growing human population, that is a luxury
that we are becoming increasingly unable to afford.

Intensive
animal production is a heavy user of fossil fuels and a major
source of pollution of both air and water. It releases large
quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere. We are risking unpredictable changes to the climate of
our planet—which means, ultimately, the lives of billions of
people, not to mention the extinction of untold thousands of
species of plants and animals unable to cope with changing
conditions—for the sake of more hamburgers. A diet heavy in animal
products, catered to by intensive animal production, is a disaster
for animals, the environment, and the health of those who eat it.

A Recipe

This recipe is
vegan, very simple, nutritious, and tasty. It's also eaten by
hundreds of millions of people every day.

In a deep
frying pan, heat the oil and fry the onion and garlic until
translucent. Add the lentils and fry them for a minute or two,
then add the water, bay leaf, cinnamon stick, and curry powder.
Stir, bring to a
boil, then let simmer for twenty minutes, adding a little
more water from
time to time if it gets dry. Add the tomatoes and simmer
another ten minutes. By now the lentils should be very
soft. Add the
creamed coconut or coconut milk and lemon juice,
if using, and salt
to taste. Remove cinnamon stick and bay leaf before serving.

The final
product should flow freely—add more water if it is
too
thick. It is usually served over rice, with some lime pickle and
mango
chutney. Sliced banana is another good accompaniment,
and so
too are pappadams.